Smokin' Aces

[fluffy]

This movie is just "too", "too". It's way over the top on violence and there are so many characters that at times it's hard to keep track of them. The FBI man that was killed acted like a guy with very little knowledge of the "bad guys"; innocent. The whole movie was so violent, needlessly, that it came off as unbelieveable. I'm not necessarily a Ben Affleck fan, but at least he was believeable as a bouny hunter. Most of the other hit men/women were just too violent and really weird. They probably had to hose down the hotel for days to get the blood out it and a month or two to repair the damage to it. Not a great movie; a B or C rating.

[Abomb]

I agree that this movie went way over the top with the violence. That's coming from someone who doesn't necessarily object to that sort of thing in movies. I guess I was expecting more of a comedy based on the commercials. (Hitmen compete to kill a mob informant and collect a million-dollar bounty! Hilarity ensues!). There were a few funny moments, but the second half of the film is pretty much all stabbings and shootings.

A few performances nearly save the movie. Alicia Keys deserves tons of credit for taking a chance in her role as a female assassin. Jason Bateman has a small cameo as a sleazy lawyer that seems taken straight from his series "Arrested Development". And Chris Pine is a hoot as the warped "brains" of a trio of Neo-Nazi punk rocker hitmen.

Overall though, the strong ensemble cast doesn't amount to much when the second half of the movie becomes a bloody mess. Sure, there's lots of action, as you'd expect from this type of movie, but it all becomes just a little too much. One hitman is supposed to be a master of disguise, but then there are two baddies posing as other people, and so-and-so gets double-crossed, and eventually it doesen't matter because everyone gets caught in one big improbable shoot-out. Think of it as "Pulp Fiction" with way more gore and a lot less dancing. In the spirit of this movie, I give it 2 bullets to the head out of 5.